Fall of Baghdad – 10 Years On

On the eve of the tenth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad,
former organiser in the Stop the War movement and Iraq hostage negotiator, Anas
Altikriti, says Iraq has never been closer to a civil war.

Ten
years ago, before the world’s mesmerised gaze, an iconic statue of Iraq’s
former dictator was pulled down amid a throng of jubilant Iraqis. None of those
present or bearing witness could have envisaged the extent, scope and depth of
the pain that would ensue over the next decade.

Among
those who danced in jubilation and took part in slapping the head of the statue
with his slippers was a local taxi driver, Abu Ahmed Al-Mishadani. An Arab
Sunni and 38-years-old at the time, he too saw this as the end of the darkest
of eras and the start of a new dawn. Married to a Shi’i woman and with five
children, his aspirations and hopes for the new era of freedom and dignity were
unlimited. He had seen the inside of a Ba’thist prison cell and the fiery end
of an electric rod too many times to allow himself a moment’s grief over the
collapsing tyrant.

Yet
since then he has been arrested three times, imprisoned for two-and-a-half
years, tortured, had seven of his fingernails extracted, his skull fractured,
both his legs and his left arm broken and his ‘honour’ violated more times than
he can remember. This last ‘confession’ usually implies rape and sexual abuse,
of which he is too ashamed to speak. Each time he was picked up by a different
group: militia this, army that. Each time he pleaded with his captors to tell
him the reason for his arrest. Each time he got no answer. The only answer that
makes any sense to him is the one he gives to whoever cares to ask: I am a Sunni;
that’s why. His wife Zahra nods in agreement.

Of
course the experience of one individual cannot be used to paint a picture of an
entire nation’s life across a whole decade. However, this story is repeated
time and again with slight variations in the details, the injuries, the
assailants and lasting wounds. There are Shi’as who tell similar horror
stories, and Kurds and Turkmens and Christians and Sabians. Indeed, there are
far too many stories to consider the experience of Abu Ahmed an isolated case
of individual corruption and mishandling.

Ten
years on, Iraq lingers at the bottom of the global
transparency index, beaten only by five other more corrupt countries. Indeed,
according to the very same American politicians who hailed the ‘New Iraq’,
corruption is at an unimaginable and on an endemic scale. The Mercer Index
points to Baghdad as the worst city in the entire world to live in, bar none.

More
than 20 million Iraqis, or 76% of the entire population, do not have regular
and constant electricity and/or clean running water. There is virtually no
education and health system to speak of, the country’s infrastructure resembles
something out of ancient times, hundreds of thousands of civilians have been
killed, and more than five million driven into exile either within or outside
Iraq. Furthermore, sectarianism has firmly taken grip of a country that,
despite its former tyrannical regimes, never managed to dictate the social or
political fabric of Iraqi society as attested by Abu Ahmed and hundreds of
thousands of other Iraqi families where the make-up is a mixture of all of
Iraq’s intrinsic and organic strands.

In
the past few weeks, as we commemorated the tenth anniversary of the largest
anti-war demonstration in British history – which I chaired – the tenth anniversary
of the war and now the tenth anniversary of the occupation of Iraq, the
question asked by most media commentators and presenters is: is Iraq better or
worse now than under Saddam Hussein?

The
question is unfair and any answer tells us nothing new. After all, who proposed
that the Iraqis had only two choices: either the dark and tyrannical days of the
Ba’thist regime, or the present misery, pain and inhumanity? Why can’t Iraqis
condemn both and yearn for something else, far better, far fairer and far more
humane? Why should Iraqis answer such an unreasonable question in order to
exonerate either a pro- or anti-war position, when it’s clearly a subjective
standpoint either way?

A
decade on from one of the most controversial and divisive decisions in modern
times, few can claim to have fared well. Not the occupying forces which,
despite gaining a military victory, lost on so many other fronts. If reports and briefings by security advisors
are anything to go by, heightened terrorism alerts in the UK and the US have
much to do with Iraq and its ramifications.

The
country has never been so close to an all-out civil war, nor has it ever been
closer to breaking up into three separate entities, than it has now. With
neighbouring Syria in a state of meltdown and Iran aiming to widen its net
influence in the region, the impact of the Iraq failure may be felt far and
wide – and not only by Iraqis destined to suffer another generation of abject
misery.

Tony
Blair, under whose premiership Britain went to war and subsequently occupied
Iraq, may cite the disposal of Saddam Hussein and the guise of democracy in
Iraq all he wants to prove that he made the right decision. The enduring legacy
of that decision, however, will be that millions of Iraqis from across the
country’s sectarian, religious and ethnic divides, have come to believe that
they are now suffering far greater than they did under Saddam. And boy did they
suffer.

But
for those who did – Abu Ahmed Al-Mishadani, his wife Zahra and thousands
more like them, who celebrated the departure of the former dictator 10 years
ago – are forced today to grieve over the loss of their collective humanity,
dignity and their dream.

Anas Altikriti is a former hostage negotiator (who led efforts to secure
the release of Norman Kember in 2005-6), chair of the two-million march,
and political thinker/ campaigner. He is the founder and CEO of the The
Cordoba Foundation. His father was one of
Iraq's Muslim Brotherhood leaders.

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